Highlights

Chief Keef“Go to Jail”

Listening to — or at least attempting to listen to — “Go to Jail,” I can’t help but find my thoughts circling back to Rowan Savage’s review of Farrah Abraham’s disasterpiece, My Teenage Dream Ended. In that write-up, Savage challenged us to get off our high horses and peer down into Abraham’s hurricane of diapers and despair, and see it for what it really was: “a reflection and magnification of the typical issues of the teen Self,” percolated through pure, unadulterated suffering. That the album, to quote Savage, “now encompasses the world, magnified — and in that magnification, reveals the seams” doesn’t make the album any easier to handle — I swear I can feel my neurons sizzling when I listen to this thing — but it certainly lends it credence. After all, to put it in the terms of my middle-school journal: the world is an ugly place.

Like Ms. Abraham’s magnum opus, “Go To Jail” is painful to listen to. Auto-Tune-drenched and more indecipherable than the hieroglyphics from Lost, Keef’s lean-addled mumbles appear incapable of staying in time with the song’s bare-bones trap beat. He’s had no problem spitting over these types of beats for the past two years, but now, it seems that the Chicago rapper would rather let loose pitch-shifting wails and rhythmic grunts. And yet, terrible as the track may be on a superficial level, it’s still writhing with the same level of anguish that made MTDE such an unexpected stroke of genius. Just as Abraham used her franken-pop as a spastic sounding board by which to process the stresses of love, loss, and unplanned parenthood, Keef has constructed “Go To Jail” as a puzzling bit of stream-of-consciousness therapy. After spending 60 days in prison, the 17-year old is clinging to his freedom more stringently than ever, even if it means giving up on the thuggery of his earlier days: “Don’t touch my pistol/ Cuz I don’t wanna have to blow/ Cuz I don’t wanna have to go to jail.” Of course, with a canvas this muddled, the interpretations are endless: thug poseur critique, post-rap experiment, paranoid rant, or maybe just a sub-par rap song. But I’ll leave the sentencing to you.

“Go to Jail”

Listening to — or at least attempting to listen to — “Go to Jail,” I can’t help but find my thoughts circling back to Rowan Savage’s review of Farrah Abraham’s disasterpiece, My Teenage Dream Ended. In that write-up, Savage challenged us to get off our high horses and peer down into Abraham’s hurricane of diapers and despair, and see it for what it really was: “a reflection and magnification of the typical issues of the teen Self,” percolated through pure, unadulterated suffering. That the album, to quote Savage, “now encompasses the world, magnified — and in that magnification, reveals the seams” doesn’t make the album any easier to handle — I swear I can feel my neurons sizzling when I listen to this thing — but it certainly lends it credence. After all, to put it in the terms of my middle-school journal: the world is an ugly place.

Like Ms. Abraham’s magnum opus, “Go To Jail” is painful to listen to. Auto-Tune-drenched and more indecipherable than the hieroglyphics from Lost, Keef’s lean-addled mumbles appear incapable of staying in time with the song’s bare-bones trap beat. He’s had no problem spitting over these types of beats for the past two years, but now, it seems that the Chicago rapper would rather let loose pitch-shifting wails and rhythmic grunts. And yet, terrible as the track may be on a superficial level, it’s still writhing with the same level of anguish that made MTDE such an unexpected stroke of genius. Just as Abraham used her franken-pop as a spastic sounding board by which to process the stresses of love, loss, and unplanned parenthood, Keef has constructed “Go To Jail” as a puzzling bit of stream-of-consciousness therapy. After spending 60 days in prison, the 17-year old is clinging to his freedom more stringently than ever, even if it means giving up on the thuggery of his earlier days: “Don’t touch my pistol/ Cuz I don’t wanna have to blow/ Cuz I don’t wanna have to go to jail.” Of course, with a canvas this muddled, the interpretations are endless: thug poseur critique, post-rap experiment, paranoid rant, or maybe just a sub-par rap song. But I’ll leave the sentencing to you.

“Become Solid”

“Become Solid” all day long. Breathe in the song’s melodies and gently stretch your lungs. Find yourself found in the center of melt. Waste away into the grains of time falling from glass to glass to glass. Easy now. Light in and light out. Lunch, maybe. Crisp in beer. Water on tap. It can give you breast and brain cancer. Looking up. With a yellow face washed in death. Witnessing the cloth covering matter to matter. Matter of straining and sighing and letting all your blood flow — no — TIDE toward your mind, and you see nothing but darkness. Your eyes swelling in darkness. Repeat this verbally, now. As best as you can.

There you “Become Solid.” In a matter of keeping it together. Keeping it together. Fuck. Manic. Fear. Paranoia. Oh,,,, shit all this all day: “Become Solid.” Stiffening sorrow. To stone from once you came, ghasts the gaze of Medusa upon the mortal being bread gone moldy. It’s the last thing you have to live off. It’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do. It’s upon the two punctured dots sunk into your leg, dragging a trail of void. Red. This is not your home anymore. It slithers away. To “Become Solid.” To keep it together. To Russian Tsarlag for the tears. Don’t get wet, but 100 times more, yes. Or, forever, please.

Review of Gagged In Boonesvillehere and an exclusive mix of Tsarlag tracks by Profligate here. The album, out on Not Not Fun, had a lot of answers for me. Try it yourself!

“Reading Illuminations”

When looking at the history of notated composition, one can ultimately sum up the basic role of musical notation as conveying how to set a sound-producing action of some sort into motion. In classical terms, this can be seen through how various dynamics and articulations, in conjunction with given notes, force performers into motion with their instruments. Of course, in the 20th century and onward, this realization/reduction of the “score” led to its manipulation, and everything from graphic notation to text scores and process music developed out of a desire to play with these ideas of action and sound.

However, one particular facet of this notational aesthetic that hasn’t yet been explored enough is the potential for all things visual/literary to be interpreted as a score. Technically, almost anything could turn into a musical score when certain parameters are applied to it, and with his latest cassette, Reading Illuminations/ A Book of Palms, Mark So showcases two of his compositions that do just that.

“Reading Illuminations” takes Robert Ashley’s notion of text/speech being a form of music in and of itself and carries it to a completely new level. The piece utilizes John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud’s “Illuminations” as a score of sorts, combining cassette recordings of So and the always awesome Julia Holter reading the text with brief field recording snippets into a dizzying tapestry of monolithic lo-fi sound. The constant flickering of the tapes turning on and off is reminiscent of So’s Wind Measures release with Patrick Farmer, but the motion’s far more active this time around. And with Ashbery/Rimbaud’s text being used to determine duration in both reading and sound production, the work takes on an effect similar to that of Ashley’s operas.

Also on the cassette is the mesmerizing “A Book of Palms,” which uses drawings of palm trees on graph paper with note-heads as the basis for what turns out to be a very beautiful solo piano work. When taken together, the two compositions show that, despite the highly conceptual methods used to create these works, So still excels at creating beautifully spare music.

Reading Illuminations/A Book of Palms is out now via Recondite Industries. You can stream “Reading Illuminations” in its entirety below:

“The Orchid Cantata”

French visual artist Félicia Atkinson has been exploring dark drones, synth tone psalms, and other ambient journeys ever since her trailer park summer in upstate New York a few years back. Yesterday, she posted “The Orchid Cantata” under her Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier moniker, hanging a chasmal canon of delayed sing-speak above one of her deepest, dimmest clatters yet. The soundwave bears the sibylline inscription: “more infos soon.”

NGTV - Vol #5

I love/hate writing about music because there’s always someone suggesting something, and t’s usually more taste-driven than anything else. Not to say friendship isn’t found, just sometimes it’s hard to enjoy, cover, and frequent every thing. Well, our man Nico Callaghan (he reviewed Falling in Reverse on TMT; BIG UP!PS) sent me a link to NGTV - Vol #5 by Naysayer & Gilsun, stating, “Don’t know if you choco [peepz] are in on this duo of DJs: http://bit.ly/16dwMB8. But they are pretty fantastic. And those images were very nice while they lasted. Please continue if you get the time.” (That last bit is because I had spammed TMT writers with random Google-found pic links.) And when “Do you ever miss having someone to talk to?” is asked around the five-minute mark and beyond: shit gets real.

So, I’m dancing around my living room naked at noon. So it’s FUCK WEEKDAY. Feel that cinematic energy. We’ve all met before. Be now. With me in words on here in this mix. Hi!